Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday November 19, 2009 @01:25PM
from the better-bring-your-bat'leth-to-school dept.

d'Armond Speers has a doctorate in computational linguistics but that wasn't enough for him. He is now pursuing the coveted "World's Worst Dad" title. To this end he has decided to treat his child like a verengan Ha'DIbaH and speak only Klingon around the child for the first 3 years of his life. "I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language," Speers told the Minnesota Daily. "He was definitely starting to learn it."

But if I were the governor of Minnesota, and I thought for a second that there were any truth to this story [at all!], then I'd sic Child Services on that SOB and have him thrown in jail faster than you can say "Fetch my betleH [klingonimp...sguild.org]".

The older I get, the more I seem to be losing my ear for sarcasm & facetiousness.
Assuming that the story is true [which I doubt], then PLEASE tell me that you were being sarcastic/facetious.
I honestly can't tell anymore..

Here in the US, we tend to not care about such trivial things as which languages someone opts to teach their child. For you see, our Bill of Rights guarantees us the Freedom of Speech. The fictitious Klingon language undoubtedly falls under this category.

If you were the governor of my state (Minnesota, the state in question), and you used Child Services to have this guy throw in jail while being completely innocent of committing any crimes, I would have you impeached faster than you can say, "Klingon".

I'm sorry, you sure you're from the same US I'm from? Where growing up learning only Spanish becomes a serious barrier in life? And many people are xenophobic and arrogant when it comes to languages?

No, being poor is a serious barrier in life... not speaking the same dialect as the minority in charge is a lot less important. My bet is not speaking English (or the official language some place else) with the proper accent (and that depends on the state/country) is a lot worse than speaking it with Spanish accent.

Granted, it's the Dad's right to be as much of a nitwit as he wishes, as long as he doesn't actually beat the kid up or some such.

Now, picture the difficulty this child will have conversing with the rest of humanity, hell let's just pick the English speaking world for now. How is he going to cope? I'm guessing he *can* speak English, but which language is his first, and hence his frame of reference? If he takes French classes at school, must he first go from French to English, then English to Klingon? Gram

Yeah, I kinda agree. If people won't teach their kids English, and we can't force 'em to do it, why is Klingon any worse than Spanish... both of which are languages that most of the US doesn't speak, and doesn't wish to learn.

Apparently, this is what happened with the Nicaraguan Sign Language [wikipedia.org], one of the latest natural languages to have appeared (on Earth).

Deaf people in Nicaragua used to communicate with hearing relatives using ad-hoc signing. Once the Sandinist revolution increased the schooling of deaf kids in the late 70s, all of these signing schemes surfaced at Nicaraguan schools, and little deaf kids, well, fixed them, and in the process created a real language.

This is a fun test of Klingon. Linguists use it as a test language, but it's synthetic. If the child develops facility with Klingon but shows problems with constructs within the language, we can postulate that those constructs are either not valid natural linguistic forms, or don't naturally exist coupled with other forms. This is great.

But on the other hand, we have a sample size of one, so while we can use the data, we'll only suspect things based on it -- we're never going to have much confidence.

Sorry for the AC, I don't remember my password. I know this guy and TFA is a sensationalized blog entry. If you follow it to the actual story (http://www.mndaily.com/2009/11/17/local-company-creates-klingon-dictionary) you get the actual important parts:

With the birth of his son 15 years ago, dedicated linguist d’Armond Speers embarked on the ultimate experiment: He spoke to him only in Klingon — the language of the alien race of “Star Trek” fame — for the first three years of his life.

“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers said. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”...

As for Speers, who still gets nostalgic when he recalls singing the Klingon lullaby “May the Empire Endure” with his son at bedtime, the experiment was a dud. His son is now in high school and doesn’t speak a word of Klingon.

I remember reading a study that did something similar to this. Only they taught English and I think French. The end result was the French was lost, however the children were able to pick it up when they studied it later.

Sorry for the AC, I don't remember my password. I know this guy and TFA is a sensationalized blog entry. If you follow it to the actual story (http://www.mndaily.com/2009/11/17/local-company-creates-klingon-dictionary) you get the actual important parts:

With the birth of his son 15 years ago, dedicated linguist d’Armond Speers embarked on the ultimate experiment: He spoke to him only in Klingon — the language of the alien race of “Star Trek” fame — for the first three years of his life.

“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers said. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”...

As for Speers, who still gets nostalgic when he recalls singing the Klingon lullaby “May the Empire Endure” with his son at bedtime, the experiment was a dud. His son is now in high school and doesn’t speak a word of Klingon.

OH MY GOD...

I’m not sure which is sadder: That I’m so thrilled to know it’s possible to do curly quotes in Slashcode, or that I’ll probably actually use them.

I normally use the alt-codes, but those are Unicode characters and Slashcode mangles them.

Now I just want to know if there’s a way to do a proper ellipsis character. It’s Alt-0133, but like the curly quotes, Slashcode mangles it.